On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 09:25:38AM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
I was going to say that at least part of the problems with floppies (tiny capacity aside) is that modern drives are media seem to be rubbish. I never remember this many problems with my first (floppy only) x68 or my Amiga or even the Opus Discovery 3 1/2 " on my Spectrum...but most of those drives cost £100 or more where as now they are £3-£5.
Yup, I had dozens of disks for my Amiga (when I got the 4000 it had an HD drive) when I sold my 2 old Amigas on ebay last year I tested them and the disks that had been put in the loft for the past 10 years to make sure they were working. From my test of about 10 games (nostalgia!) all of them played ok as did other disks pulled at random. They don't build them like they used to.
Also have you noticed that Windows still is pretty much incapable of doing much else when it is reading/writing to a floppy.
Yup, *GRIND* *CHUNTTER* *CLICK* *CLICK* *CLICK* *GRIIIIIIIND* although to be fair, Linux wouldn't even mount the floppies I had yesterday, god knows why. I seem to recall that Linux also uses an inordinate amount of cpu power to pull data off a floppy disk is this a limitation of the x86 architecture? Back in the day I remember my Amiga pulling data off a disk while doing stuff at the same time.
I seriously think if you still have important data on floppy you want to get it off the disks now and look at emulators/archiving a different way. Mainly due to the amount of desk/shelf space you will save! When I look at my firesafe which has an interior the size of a shoebox which currently has 3 or 4 Mini DV tapes (12 gigs each) and about 30 DVD-R I have (potentially) about 177 Gigabytes of data in there, if it contained only floppy disks then I'd be struggling :)
Thanks Adam